Tag: Greg Kihlström

This article was written by Greg Kihlström for MarTech. Unfashionable as it may be to say, direct mail will outlast most of the agentic commerce startups pitching you today. That’s a strange thing to say in a year when AI agents influenced 20% of all Cyber Week orders in…

This article was written by Greg Kihlström for CMSWire. The marketing technology industry names a shift after the part of it that has the best demos and makes the best headlines. We called the last decade “composable” after an architecture, and we are now calling this one “agentic” after…

The Brand Visibility for Agentic Commerce framework has, until now, treated trust as something a brand emits — the structured reviews, certifications, and authority links an agent can weight when it decides whether a product is credible. That’s one direction. The developments of late 2025 and 2026 have opened…

Originally posted on GregKihlstrom.com: Recent research and insights from HBR, Forrester, and MarketingProfs point at the same problem from different directions, and a product launch from Databricks adds a fourth angle. AI is everywhere in marketing now. Most organizations are aiming it at speed and cost savings, while the…

Recent research signals a pivotal inflection point for marketing organizations: AI is moving beyond merely a productivity tool to become the operating system of marketing itself. But the gap between AI’s promise and its practical deployment is widening, not narrowing. Three structural tensions are emerging that CMOs must confront…

The latest intelligence from Forrester, Gartner, HBR, and MarketingProfs converges on an uncomfortable truth for marketing leaders that I’ve discussed several times before in this series: AI adoption is accelerating faster than organizational readiness. The gap between what AI can do and what marketing teams are actually equipped to…

AI agents now sit on both sides of the transaction. They rank the information that shapes a purchase, they buy on a person’s behalf, and they sell inside answer engines and assistants. Forrester made the stakes plain for marketing leaders this week: brands market to machines as well as…

This article was written by Greg Kihlström for CMSWire. The talk track is familiar across just about any marketing or customer experience event lately. AI will write your content, route your tickets, predict your churn and book the room before the guest knows they want it.

Three reports landed this week from the big enterprise-intelligence shops, and read side by side they tell one story. AI is doing more than changing how marketing runs day to day. It’s changing who you’re even selling to. Brand matters more now than it has in years, and at…

This week’s signals point to a structural shift in go-to-market architecture, not incremental AI feature adoption. The convergence of AI-mediated B2B buying (HBR’s “dark funnel” research), agentic commerce payment infrastructure (Visa/Mastercard), and persistent gaps in AI ROI measurement creates a strategic inflection point for marketing leaders. CMOs who treat…